Appleby Plays Chicken by Michael Innes Read Free Book Online Page A

then either he shot himself, or I did. Is that right?’
    ‘Yes, I think it is.’
    ‘And you can see that somebody coming along to investigate – as the police will presently have to do – will be obliged to consider the converse possibility?’
    ‘That if this is murder, I may be the murderer? Yes, of course.’ David said this steadily, although it was the first time that his mind had in fact clearly focused on the fantastic fact that he might himself fall under suspicion.
    The stranger had his kindly smile again. ‘But unfortunately, you know, far more people blow their own brains out than have it done for them by another person. Suicide is far the most substantial probability we confront. No doubt you see that. But there’s another possibility, and one which I think you haven’t considered. This fellow may really have been murdered, and an appearance of suicide simply fixed on him. It’s a tenable hypothesis, allowing for the possibility of your being mistaken about that shot.’
    ‘How could I be mistaken about that shot?’ David asked this with a puzzled air that wasn’t wholly genuine. He really was learning something, he felt. For there was an unnatural slant to the way the stranger was going to work with this police talk. He might of course be authentically cool and unperturbed. That was quite in the middle-aged, military picture. But there was something spurious in his attitude, all the same. Could he, conceivably, be playing for time? Suddenly alert to a danger he hadn’t so far thought of, David strolled again to the verge of the rocky platform, mounted the low natural rampart that almost surrounded it, and took another survey of the moor. At least that was all right. There were no confederates of the stranger’s drawing a sinister cordon round the summit, although they might conceivably be lurking behind the Loaf. Slightly abashed at having entertained this highly melodramatic fancy, David repeated his question. ‘How could I be mistaken about the shot?’
    ‘There is, you know, a certain amount of shooting on the moor. You may have heard shots earlier on your walk. Then, finding this’ – and the stranger gave his curt nod again at the body – ‘your mind may have played a trick on you. Or there may have happened to be a shot quite far away, which your ear just caught. Then, when you came on a man with a bullet through his head, your memory brought the sound, so to speak, to close quarters.’
    ‘I’m not sure I see what you’re getting at.’
    ‘That’s how you may feel in court.’
    ‘In court?’ Despite himself, David was startled.
    ‘If this awkward business ever gets there. Counsel have a trick of going ahead so that it isn’t easy for the witness to see their drift. It can be unnerving.’
    David felt rather cross at this. ‘I don’t think’, he said, ‘I’m very interested in that at the moment.’
    ‘Very well – and what I’m trying to say, then, is this: granted that any shot you heard or thought you heard wasn’t in fact the shot that despatched our unfortunate friend here, he may have been murdered – but murdered well before either of us came on the scene.’
    ‘The body’s warm.’
    The stranger shook his head. ‘I’m not conjecturing that this happened last night. The inside of an hour is all we need. If the police take it into their heads that this isn’t suicide – and I can’t see why they should – there would be a perfectly reasonable line in that.’
    ‘I see.’ And – if rather obscurely – David thought that he did see. The stranger was feeling his way – and in a direction decidedly less than honest. ‘What about the smoke?’ David asked abruptly. ‘I suppose you saw that ?’
    ‘Yes, I saw the smoke.’ Very surprisingly, the urbane stranger flushed. It was almost as if he had been stung to some sudden anger. Then he turned away, walked to the little heap of ashes, stared at it, and stirred it with his toe. ‘Odd, no doubt,’ he